Sound volume level meter

S

Sinisa Kasalovic

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Nov 9, 2018
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Hi guys,
I have a korg keyboard and obviously it has many sounds and some of them samples. Main issue I have is to do with the volume. When I play at home, volume is fine; however when I connect the keyboard to the PA system some sounds are really noisy and other ones are not loud enough. Is there a device that I can connect to my keyboard to measure what volume output signal comes out of keyboard? I would like to keep my sounds balanced so I do not have to move my master volume a lot. Please advise

Thank you
 
Most mixers have VU (volume unit) meters that could give you a visual indication of level, a variation of 10 dB will generally sound twice or half as loud.
That said, our ears are less sensitive to low frequencies and most sensitive to frequencies in the 4000 Hz range, so the frequency content of the sound can make a mid-oriented sound seem much louder than it's VU level would indicate.
Listening to your sounds on headphones with something like talk radio going on in the background to compare level to will help arrive at a balance, though the VU meter will get you in the "ballpark" for most sounds.
 
Sinisa Kasalovic said:
Hi guys,
I have a korg keyboard and obviously it has many sounds and some of them samples. Main issue I have is to do with the volume. When I play at home, volume is fine; however when I connect the keyboard to the PA system some sounds are really noisy and other ones are not loud enough. Is there a device that I can connect to my keyboard to measure what volume output signal comes out of keyboard? I would like to keep my sounds balanced so I do not have to move my master volume a lot. Please advise

Thank you
Click to expand...
In addition to what Art said, which will get you in the ballpark, you really have to listen to the sound in context with the other instruments that are playing. I am a keyboard player and found that the best thing to do is do a multitrack recording all of your practices/gigs (this is easy if you have a digital board). I use Reaper as my DAW as it is inexpensive and rock solid for recording with our X32 Rack. This will allow you to go back and listen to the raw inputs to the console and compare levels between instruments. This is important because sometimes another instrument may be "stepping" on your frequency range (or you are stepping on theirs... LOL) which cause your sound to me muddled or quiet.

Another issue you may be fighting is not having your Setups leveled. I don't have a Korg (I have a Kurzweil PC3K7) , so my terminology may be different. In the Kurz, the basic sounds are called a Program. This is played on one MIDI channel. You can put up to 16 Programs together into a Setup and adjust the range, volume, splits, tuning of each of the Programs separately. I have a separate Setup for each song our band plays. What I have found is that some of the Programs I use in my Setups are too quite for use in a song when I am soloing. So what I did was reduce the volume of every Program in each Setup by 60 (out of 127) so that I would have more dynamic range between the songs where needed more volume from a quiet Program compared to the Programs which were hot. This took some time (and required the use of reviewing recordings as discussed above) but the result is that now I get the levels I need from using Setups. While you can increase the volume of a Program, I have found its better to leave them alone and work with the volumes in Setups instead. I do, on occasion mess with individual Programs, but when I do I save the new one under a different name/number. Hope this helps!
 
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